In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

by Elena Ferrante

Over time, writing has come to mean giving shape to a permanent balancing and unbalancing of myself, arranging fragments in a frame and waiting to mix them up. Thus the novel of love begins to satisfy me when it becomes the novel of being out of love. The mystery begins to absorb me when I know that no one will find out who the murderer is. The bildungsroman seems to me on the right track when it’s clear that no one will be built. Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly. And characters? I feel they are false when they exhibit clear coherence and I become passionate about them when they say one thing and do the opposite. “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” say those extraordinary narrators who are the witches in Macbeth as they prepare to hover through the fog and filthy air. But we’ll talk about this and other things next time.